by Alex Monroe
Halfway through my second year at university I spotted a girl across the platform at Aldgate East underground station. I had just got off the east-bound train and there she was, waiting for a west-bound one. She was carrying a scruffy A2 portfolio and wore straight-leg black jeans, black Converse and a donkey jacket. A dark blue sailor’s cap was perched on the back of her head, not quite covering black hair with a bleached quiff, its streaks of yellow tufting up under the peak of her cap, except for the one strand that had fallen across her eyes. Her pale skin and dark black eyebrows and lashes had me completely transfixed. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
I stood glued to the spot on the opposite platform, staring at her unnoticed as she waited for her train. When it arrived I panicked and ran up and over to her platform, terrified of losing her, but by the time I had got to the other side she was gone.
I felt sick. The time was half past ten. If I stood on this platform at the exact same time every day I’d be sure to see her again, wouldn’t I? So I did. Every day. It took a couple of weeks and finally she turned up. And she was an art student like me, doing her foundation course. Her name was Siobhan. It’s tempting now to pass her off as Johanna’s corvine forerunner – dark and lustrous, creative and mysterious. But Siobhan was neither a peacock nor a crow, just herself: a young woman full of doubts and insecurities and completely unaware of her heart-stopping beauty. I fell hopelessly in love.
Lovebirds
A rummage in my scrapbox produces a rusty slab of steel. It’s called mild steel, because it’s low carbon and relatively malleable. Still, it takes an hour or so to saw it into the shape I need for a former, the scaffolding for the two domed halves of the locket I’m going to make. Eventually I have a chunky steel heart in the palm of my hand. I need a handle of some kind, so I braze a short length of square-section steel rod onto the back of it. That’s always a hot job, but brazing, using brass, is stronger than simply soldering. Then I begin to grind the steel into shape with a sanding disc on my polisher, rounding off the sharp corners to make the heart smoothly three-dimensional. The heat intensifies further with the friction, and I feel the burn in my fingers. When I get to a point where I can finish off by hand with a file and emery paper, a whispering hush descends on the workshop.
All the time I’ve been sawing and soldering and sanding and filing, I’ve been thinking about the filigree. This locket is to be made of two domed filigree hearts. I’ve already drawn the pattern on a flat surface, but how do I transfer it onto one that’s domed? How do I make my design work in 3D? Though it’s easiest to pierce out when flat, the pattern will distort horribly when I lay the silverwork on the steel former to shape it into the birdcage locket.
I have an idea. I cut a piece of sheet silver much bigger than the actual heart and anneal it – a heat process which softens the metal – before sticking on a paper printout of the pattern, with double-sided tape. On the floor of my workshop stands a section of old tree trunk about the size of a large bongo drum. The square hole cut in its top surface usually holds a stake for forging silver, something like an anvil. It’s a great dead weight to bash on or into and I cut it from the elm bough that smashed through my parents’ house in the hurricane of 1987. Carving a rough heart-shaped indent into the top of this log, I now place my heart-shaped sheet of silver over it, pattern-side down, and hold the steel former on top. Then I whack it as hard as I can with a hammer. Whack! Again and again. I use the heaviest hammer in my arsenal. Whack! This is fun. A fantastically brutal way to achieve a delicate result.
Me, forging a length of silver in my studio in Elephant and Castle, on the wych-elm log taken from Cherrytrees.
It does take ages, though. As the metal is stronger than the wood, I keep having to recarve the indent in the log in order to force the metal to bend itself around the former more accurately. If I anneal it again, the pattern will just burn off. An hour or so later, I find the printed paper pattern has miraculously survived, more than usably, and I snip off the spare metal that has concertina’d into a frill around the edge. By the time I’ve fixed the handle of the former into my vice and knocked the silver sheet back into place with a tiny boxwood mallet, it’s looking like the heart of my dreams. This is going to be a generous, full-bodied locket. It’s going to hang on a long chain, mid-chest, and it will layer beautifully with some of our shorter necklaces.
And now I’m ready to pierce out the filigree on my cutting pin. My confidence in the lovebird locket is growing.
Everybody at college was talking about the new exhibition. Words like ‘seminal’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘ground-breaking’ were bandied about. I was as excited as anyone else as I walked off the newly regenerated streets of Covent Garden and into the British Crafts Centre in the summer of 1982. Jewellery Redefined was the promise. Here at last was the challenge we’d been waiting for: not just a radical response to the gold and gem-set pieces that cost a fortune in hushed Bond Street jewellers, but a riposte to their high-street alternative too – the kind of mass-produced fashion jewellery Gerald Ratner would soon be calling ‘total crap’. The very notion of what could be described as precious would be questioned. New materials explored. Experimentation nurtured. Jewellery’s interaction with the human form rediscovered. This was to be the ‘Front Line’ of jewellery making.
Brimming with expectation, I began to look around. The first thing I saw was described as a ‘neckpiece’. Actually there were a great many ‘neckpieces’ here, of knotted latex, fabric and shells; wicker and weeds; cane and coloured cloth; knitted or woven nylon. A few bright lengths of plastic-coated sprung steel, curved into unfinished circles, announced themselves as ‘flexible neckpieces’, and a Finnish artist had suspended little printed cotton cushions from stitched ribbons and offered the piece as a ‘headdress, necklace, waistband or breast-band’. I saw ‘breast jewels’ of copper and nylon woven into papyrus shapes, and a scattering of brooches, each one a plastic-headed drawing pin on a rubber pad. A collection of torn cinema tickets had been threaded onto a pair of earrings. There was a lot more plastic netting. One pair of artists had radically labelled a round ‘mixed-media’ brooch as a ‘badge’.
I wandered on, hoping for the provocation I had yet to find. But it was all remarkably similar in feel. Things in plastic bags. A nod to voodoo with some twisted feathers, bone and leather constructions, frayed fabric on twigs. Torn paper. Cotton thread. Little of real beauty. So much for there being ‘no limits’ here at ‘the first international exhibition of non-precious jewellery’.
My bubble of hope burst and I was left feeling distinctly deflated. It hadn’t been that long since the Tate had bought Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre, better known as A Pile of Old Bricks, and its display had provoked outrage. The newspapers had a field day and people ranted in pubs for months. How could the Tate waste so much money on a load of bricks arranged in a rectangle? Who was to say what Art was? Naively, perhaps, I’d hoped for a similarly cataclysmic reaction to this jewellery exhibition. But as I stood there in the silent whitewalled gallery, my overwhelming reaction was one of boredom. The place was nearly empty. The few other visitors I could see kept their voices to a whisper, and studied the labels with great intensity. They looked a familiar type – a mixture of academics, teachers, makers and jewellery students, I guessed. This exhibition was preaching to the converted. The questions it was asking were never going to excite a wider crowd. They simply weren’t interesting enough.
Coming in here had none of the thrill of descending into a nightclub full of New Romantics. It didn’t make me grin like I did when I heard a drunkard raging against Modern Art. Or when I slid on those Vivienne Westwood trousers I’d bought when I first came to London. Here I was, studying jewellery at the art school with the best reputation in the country for the profession, at the start of a four-year degree course, and I felt more enthusiasm about discovering Issey Miyake’s shop in Sloane Street and his bright red plastic bustiers than I did about anything here. I did try. I really tried.
After all, this was my world. This was what I had chosen to do for a living. But there wasn’t a single piece on show that made me tingle. I felt hugely let down, but I wasn’t sure by what or by whom.
It was the same story at college. Although I thrived in the workshops, where I was learning all kinds of new technical skills, when it came to the way design was taught at Sir John Cass, I struggled. Innate contrariness combined with a hatred of snobbery made me kick against the elitist prejudices of my lecturers. Their ideals were outdated, I thought. Their approach felt prescriptive and academic, with intellectual analysis always coming before intuition and emotion. It made for a rarefied atmosphere – cerebral and exclusive, with little interest in aesthetics. As for the idea of fashion, there was only one word dirtier: ‘commercial’.
I had moved to London for a reason. The creativity of popular movements was alive and all around, wherever you looked, and the buzz was inspiring. Young British artists had suddenly started selling their work for huge sums of money and they were proud of it. Every taxi driver had an opinion on the latest architecture. On my way to college each day, I watched the Lloyd’s building taking shape, its peculiar inside-outness attracting crowds of onlookers. Out of college I devoured Vogue, where there was no shame in commerciality. But meanwhile, my own chosen discipline seemed to be languishing. It had stalled somewhere in the past and seemed unable to get going again. I suspected that I was being taught by the culprits.
Jewellery was rigidly segregated in the early 1980s, its distinctive groups set in their ways and quite uninterested in what was happening elsewhere. The glitzy Bond Street jewellers were all sparkles and diamonds, bound to tradition and stuffy values, self-consciously uninventive. Heritage jewellery. At the opposite end of the spectrum, cheap-as-chips reproduction Victorian engagement rings rotated mechanically on red velvet cushions in the musty windows of the high-street chains. So-called ‘fashion jewellery’ was sold on revolving racks by the checkouts of clothing shops. Cheap, plastic and imported, it was just a bit of disposable fun for accessorising a new frock. There were a few memorable exceptions in the fashion world, like the glitzy diamante costume jewellery of Butler & Wilson, just then gracing film stars on billboards, or Monty and Sarah Don’s jewel gardens, which were actually paste in those days, and shrieked glamour.
The pieces on display at Jewellery Redefined failed to speak to either side of this divided world. Actually, I don’t think they even wanted to. My art school clique only seemed interested in work shown in muted galleries full of unwearable objects with pages of unreadable text by their side. I wondered how Issey Miyake, Richard Rogers or Boy George would have got on in such a rigid and divided discipline.
Heading out into the real world, I felt despondent and confused. Annoyed, too. I wandered away from Seven Dials, off towards Leicester Square Tube station. Charing Cross Road was busy. I watched a group of punky young women waiting to cross. They were all dressed up and looking good: tousled hair tied up with rags and off-the-shoulder tops with bra straps showing. They wore St Christopher medals round their necks, layered with heavier chains and great big gold crosses. One had a mass of black-and-white beaded bracelets on her wrist, a rosary-style necklace and big black crucifix earrings in the style Madonna would soon popularise with the release of ‘Holiday’. Others sported huge hoop earrings the size of curtain rings, or long dangly ones, and heavy plastic rings on their fingers. This is what jewellery is all about, I thought petulantly. This is where I want my designs to be on show. Out on the street, not in a stuffy gallery.
Street fashion in London is in fine exhibitionist form begins a feature called ‘Peacocks on Parade’ in a 1983 Vogue. A shaven-headed young woman in a studded leather jacket wears a big fake vintage pearl in a floral setting on one lobe, while a couple of crucifixes dangle from the other. Others wear loo-chain necklaces, home-made strings of beads, ethnic pieces mixed with DIY. These aren’t models in studio shots. Like all the most interesting pages in the fashion magazines I’ve kept from those days, these vibrant images have been photographed on the streets of London, at the places I used to visit: the King’s Road, the Wag Club, the Camden Palace – probably Charing Cross Road too.
Instead of going down into the Tube station, I kept going, thinking and people-watching. I walked on along to Regent Street and through the dark carved doorway into Liberty. Perhaps I was hoping to find some answers there. The whole shop was lively, vibrant and exciting. And the jewellery department was busy. Looking around at some of the designs on sale, I sympathised with the hopes of the exhibition I’d just left. I knew what it was trying to achieve. But if anything were to change, it would have to be from the ground up, here in the shops, on the streets, on TV or in the pages of a magazine. I realised clearly that I wanted to work at the coalface, for real people living real lives. Jewellery isn’t an intellectual thing. It’s expressive, emotional, even a sensual experience.
A poor attempt at my first passport photograph, taken in 1986.
And why despise ‘fashion’ jewellery? The groundwork for any redefinition of jewellery is not to be seen on a display gondola in Harrods, critic Sarah Osborn wrote disdainfully in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue. These brave first stages are too often beyond the eyes and experience of most jewellery wearers. As far as I’m concerned, ‘fashion’ just means that it’s made to be worn, not marvelled at behind glass, or kept in a safe. I’m not interested in jewellery or anything else that’s created so that a small minority can feel superior about it. ‘Fashion’ jewellery is by definition popular, but that shouldn’t devalue it in any way or make it ephemeral. It certainly doesn’t have to mean dull or safe or predictable. Somewhere between Seven Dials and Oxford Circus, I became convinced that I wanted to share my ideas with everybody, not just a few connoisseurs. And I was willing to fight for that chance. With this realisation, everything suddenly became exciting again. If the jewellery world wasn’t yet quite the way I wanted, then I would have to try and change it.
Things were going well with Siobhan, the girl from the underground. This was clearly not a passing infatuation. Far from fizzling out, the love I felt for her grew slowly and steadily, filling me up until I could actually feel it like a dull ache in my chest. We began to spend most of our time together. She had no parents and lived in a red-brick mansion block in West Hampstead with her soft-hearted Canadian grandmother, a Portobello antiques dealer.
There was always something new to discover in their flat. Everywhere you turned there were pieces of old furniture waiting to be restored, piles of enticing boxes, stacks of old magazines, a gilt frame without a mirror. It was dark and dusty and alluring, and you never knew if what you picked up would turn out to be precious or not. When the weather was fine we’d walk to Hampstead and picnic on the Heath, or shop in Camden Market for vintage Levi 501s with the right colour stitching. The rest of the time I was happy to explore, fishing through a trunk, examining a wrought-iron cross, opening drawers.
Then Siobhan’s grandmother died. Siobhan was left devastated and completely alone, with the flat and a future to sort out. I felt needed and I loved her all the more for it. It took months and months to sift through every hoarded roomful. In trying to help, I often found myself forgetting her sorrow and mine as I rummaged guiltily through undiscovered cardboard boxes, like an excited child who has found a treasure trove. Siobhan was more childlike still. Stripped of her years by grief, she sobbed quietly as she sorted, every object she handled a reminder of her loss.
At last everything was gone. Echoing and empty, the flat could be sold. Siobhan got a place on a textiles degree course at Farnham. We celebrated at my bedsit in Clapham and made plans to meet up every weekend.
With new-found direction, I studied hard, graduated from college and looked around for a place to work. 401½ Workshops was a ramshackle tumble of buildings on the Wandsworth Road, where I shared a tiny brick shed with a potter called Pam Leung, and called it my studio. Acrid kiln-firing fumes mingled with the gass
y scent of the torch on my forge, and clay dust got everywhere and blunted my tools. I just about managed to pay the rent each week. Another jeweller worked in the main building opposite – Carol Mather, from Leeds, who made little animated animals in etched brass – and soon her sculptor friend Jason Cleverly moved up from Devon to join her, carving wooden automata next door. This was Jason who later married Kathy, who went on to meet Sally Beaumont in China. Together with the other craftspeople in this labyrinthine building we formed a sort of family. We worked pretty much all day, every day, and long into the night too, sharing takeaways and tins of cheap beer. Occasionally someone asked us to take part in an exhibition, or a gallery shop would take a few pieces and hope to sell them, and we’d all rejoice.
Craft had become a noun, and although it wasn’t quite Art, it was trying to be. The trouble was that everything I made was taken on a Sale or Return basis. If the gallery sold a piece they would, at some point, pay me. If not, it eventually made its way back to me. Sale or Return actually meant slowly starving in silence.
I couldn’t go on like this. So I gave up on the galleries, and made up a small selection of earrings – hollow-domed discs as big as your ear, based loosely on Celtic axes and spearheads – packed them up and made my way to Hampstead. I emerged from the deep Tube station at the top of the hill, and wandered up and down the steep shopping streets, hoping to sell my wares. The owner of a little boutique called XYZ loved what I had made and bought the lot. I returned to my studio with a cheque in my hand and took the gang out for a drink. We sat in the Surprise with pints and crisps, and for me at least the way was set. I was a fashion jeweller. For the first time in ages, I felt I knew exactly what I was doing. But if my childhood had taught me anything, it was to expect the unexpected. You never knew when the next catapult shot might knock you flying.